A Meeting of Metal and Mettle
The crowd was cheering and ringing cow bells. The teams had come from universities as far away as Hawaii, New York and Canada. The contestants raced around the track on contraptions that had a faint resemblance to bicycles.
No, this wasn’t some sort of funky NCAA sporting event. It was the 15th Annual Human Powered Vehicle Competition, a matchup of creativity and engineering know-how as well as physical strength.
About 40 teams of mechanical engineering students came to San Diego for the weekend with their HPVs, as the vehicles are affectionately known. On Friday they presented their designs to a panel of judges; on Saturday they performed sprints on a runway at Miramar Naval Air Station; and on Sunday they put their inventions to the test at the San Diego Naval Training Center in a 40-mile road race around a course rife with hairpin turns.
Around the country, about 1,000 professional and would-be engineers build human-powered vehicles for fun, according to Len Brunkalla, president of the Indianapolis-based International Human Powered Vehicle Assn. A few hundred of them turned out for the collegiate event, which was hosted by the UCSD chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
“Thousands of man-hours have gone into these vehicles, along with years of planning and design,” said Dave Trevino, a UCSD mechanical engineering student and contest organizer.
Most of the vehicles are variations of drag-minimizing recumbent bicycles, with riders close to the ground and peddling with their legs stretched out in front of them. For speed tests, they are encapsulated by teardrop-shaped fairings--aerodynamic shells made from fiberglass, Kevlar, aluminum and other materials.
Cyclope, the entry from University Laval in Quebec, won Saturday’s sprints with a top speed of 43.34 miles per hour. (The unofficial speed record for a human-powered vehicle is 68.7 mph, Brunkalla said.) The University of Hawaii was the overall winner of the competition.
The team from UCLA finished in the top 10 with its sleek black vehicle, dubbed Road Kill. The design evolved over three years--early versions fell over, then improvements made it too cumbersome to maneuver. Today it can go so fast that the team had to install a hydraulic braking system, said project leader Henry Hsu, a senior in mechanical engineering.
The entry from UC Irvine was called Scream because that’s what the rider wants to do when he sees it, said co-captain Mike McCleary. “It looks very uncomfortable,” he said. “You sit forward in a Superman kind of position. We have a hip rest instead of a seat.”
Scream was in the middle of the pack until early in the road race, when freshman rider Jeff Lassegard peddled so hard that the chain stay sheared apart. (Teammate Mark Lengsfeld plans to reinforce it with additional steel tubing and ride the vehicle along the boardwalk in Huntington Beach.)
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That wasn’t the worst wipeout of the competition. Diablo, a promising design from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, took a dramatic spill going around a curve and sent pieces of its fairing flying in the path of other vehicles.
The competition’s purpose is to give students a flavor of real-life engineering, and it’s surely some consolation to know that designs don’t always work out in the real world, either.
“This has given me a good idea of the process of engineering and the management and organizational requirements to do a project,” said Eric Wang, who worked on both of UCSD’s HPVs, a single-rider vehicle called Marlin II and a tandem entry called Silver Bullet. “You can’t just do book work, you need to be able to apply the engineering that you’ve learned.”
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Karen Kaplan covers technology, telecommunications and aerospace for the Times. She can be reached via e-mail at Karen.Kaplan@latimes.com
